Assessment of Image Quality vs. Computation Cost for Different Parameterizations of Ultrasound Imaging Pipelines

Ultrasound imaging is a technique widely used in medicine to visualize organs and other body structures, capturing their position, size, morphology and any pathological lesions. Its use is unfortunately limited to specialized centers with trained personnel, and it would be beneficial to expand its applicability to environments like on-the-sheld emergency response and family physician cabinets. This requires the development of new ultrasound platforms that must be faster, lower-power, easier to use, safe and reliable. One of the major challenges to be met is to dynamically manage a myriad of different imaging options and configuration parameters, which impact image quality and computation cost at the same time. Focusing on this challenge, in this paper we first give an overview of ultrasound imaging techniques and of their possible configuration and parametrization options. We then discuss the impact of these options on computation cost and image quality, showing outcomes from a prototype Matlab ultrasound imaging pipeline.